Privacy Preserving Analytics – Creation of a New Category!

On a bright warm August afternoon, I was having lunch with a friend when I noticed an email from a Gartner analyst congratulating us for having been named a Cool Vendor!  As we all know very well, Gartner has extremely high standards for recognizing a new vendor and we are humbled and extremely thankful for this much revered recognition.  At Baffle, we set out on a mission to accomplish what is considered impossible – adopt encryption into an enterprise workflow without compromising the utility of that data.  Sounds like ‘having your cake and eating it too?’ Yes, that is exactly what it is.

In today’s world of ‘free’ everything, data collection is a given.  Data is an asset but along with it comes the liability. I love how Gartner characterizes the Chief Data Officer (CDO) as an asset manager while the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) as a liability manager.  Thanks to increasingly stringent privacy regulations, misappropriating a customer/client/constituent’s data creates massive exposure to punitive penalties. The secret to solving this problem is ‘privacy preserving analytics’, a term that Gartner is using to categorize an emerging technology solution.  

Encryption adoption is a challenge whether it is convincing users to protect their disks, messages, web browser accesses or applications.  The industry has successfully solved ‘in motion’ encryption with SSL that is transparent to all of us except for the ‘s’ that is added after the http in web addresses.  The same has been accomplished with messages without us doing anything as users while the apps take care of the protection. Storage encryption, either standalone, or behind a database has also been addressed but when it comes to application encryption, we have wide gaping holes.  The brute force method of using an SDK to encrypt at the application tier breaks the application and its ability to process data.  

At Baffle, we have a simple mandate – encrypt data in enterprise workflows without disrupting application operation.  We make the process to protect sensitive data at the record level, with row or column granularity, without impacting performance and allow comprehensive monitoring of that sensitive data.  Download the Gartner report on “Cool Vendors in Privacy Preservation in Analytics” here and see why we are Cool!